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War against the Strogg
The human race was suddenly thrust into a full-scale worldwide war with the Strogg in the mid 21st Century. Though initially they believed that the Strogg intended to strip Earth of its natural resources, humans soon learned that the Strogg are only in search of one thing that their existence required: the human remains of those they kill. It became clear that the Strogg were collecting the humans' own dead and using them to augment their own armies by attaching weapons and machinery welded onto their bodies, and turning them into mindless soldiers slaved to the Strogg's purpose. Before the War In the years prior to the Strogg invasion of and war on Earth, Mankind was advancing at a steady pace. It is known, for instance, that a supranational organization by the name of the Global Defense Force had by the mid-21st century been established, perhaps acting as the UN's military wing, perhaps replacing the old UN entirely. Peace among the nations of Man was illusive, however, as reports of terrorist attacks on Peking (Beijing?), Reykjavik and Tokyo were circulating shortly before the war. There was also at this time a Human colony of some description on the planet Mars; indicating that interplanetary manned spaceflight was just beginning to develop. In addition, at least one new space station had been built by this period, named after Ferdinand Magellan; famous Portuguese explorer of the 16th century. It was probably sited in Earth orbit. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the galaxy, the Strogg, in their constant search for fresh species to convert, located the Earth and deemed it worthy of further investigation. It is likely that they sent reconnaissance craft into the Solar System first, to gather information on Earth from afar, and to plant one or more Strogg Slipgates in strategic orbital positions so that the main Strogg fleet would be able to take maximum advantage of the element of surprise; arriving straight into Earth orbit and able to immediately commence the invasion. How these reconnaissance craft (and the Slipgate seen in Earth orbit) travelled the great distances from Stroggos to Earth without using a Slipgate already in existence in the Solar System is a mystery - it may be possible that the Earth had actually been identified as a target several centuries earlier, and that the gateway was transported to the location that the Solar System was calculated to be at in a craft traveling at relativistic speeds, but this has not been confirmed. A report from an unidentified news agency on Earth, broadcast just days the war erupted, indicated that the aforementioned Martian colony had been abandoned (for reasons yet unknown), and that plans were afoot to re-establish it. It went on to state that this had "nothing to do with the arrival of the mysterious aliens in the Solar System". The report may have been informed by a government press release, perhaps seeking to cover up the facts of the abandoned Mars colony's fate. Immediately prior to the Strogg's arrival, radio telescope arrays operated by SETI detected transmissions of unknown, non-terrestrial origin coming from just outside the asteroid belt of the Solar System. The head of SETI was due to hold a press conference concerning these transmissions, however it is not known whether this event actually went ahead, or whether events (the opening shots of the war) simply overtook everyone. Shortly thereafter, the Magellan Space Station was destroyed by the vast incoming Strogg fleet, the main bulk of which arrived via a carefully positioned Slipgate, and the Strogg War on Earth began. The War on Earth Initially the Strogg held the advantage in the war; the element of surprise was firmly on their side, and they possessed a distinct technological advantage over the Human forces. However, the Humans were resourceful, intelligent and highly adaptable, and used their skills of innovation and scientific ability to learn more about the Strogg through captured technologies and intercepted transmissions. In this way, the means to the Strogg's ultimate undoing eventually fell into the hands of Man. Despite all of these victories and adapted technologies, however, the war still lasted many years, seeing the destruction of most of the great cities of Earth and the killing or capturing of untold millions of people. It was only by sacrificing countless lives and draining the planet's resources that the Humans were able to drive the Strogg off-world and out of the Solar System. Its collective experience with the Strogg shook the Human race to its core, and left its home-world burnt and scarred. The Humans knew that the Strogg would not give up their attempt to take Earth easily, and were terrified of the possibility of a renewed invasion. They were convinced that the enemy would soon launch a far more ferocious attack, which would surely be the end of all Mankind. The Humans were also determined to have their revenge against the Strogg for devastating the Earth and its people so profoundly. The Strogg had made the war personal for every Human being. The First Invasion of Stroggos When the Strogg homeworld was located, the humans' newly constituted Terran Coalition of Man (TCM) (either conceived as a replacement for the old GDF (Global Defense Force) or as a supranational organization of which the GDF is a component part), attempted to land on Stroggos to exact vengeance for the unprovoked Strogg war on Earth by sending two large troop ships, the Phobos and the Deimos, carrying tens or hundreds of thousands of troops to wage war on the Strogg's home planet. However well conceived the TCM believed its war plans were, they contained monumental miscalculations, which would lead to calamity. They did not anticipate that Strogg had put in place a massive global defence system to repulse off-world attacks, dubbed the "Big Gun" by TCM commanders, which they used to generate an enormous electromagnetic pulse (EMP), disabling most of the drop pods on entry, scattering most of them in the process and allowing the Strogg to kill or capture their occupants whenever and wherever they landed. Most of the surviving soldiers were immediately captured and subjected to various grim fates, such as the case of some marines being crushed and broken down into component parts to be used by the Strogg as both protein food and as building materials new Strogg creations. Others still were condemned to horrifying torture sessions and extensive medical experimentation. Only a handful of marines survived the initial landing operation; one such marine only survived due to his drop pod being clipped by another pod on entry into the planetary atmosphere, causing his pod to malfunction, sending him many miles to the south of his team's designated Landing Zone (LZ), where he crashed into the edge of a small Strogg base. The base was situated beside a lake, near extensive warehousing facilities to the north-east and west, and wasn't too far from the Strogg's Tactical Command facility, which another marine would later decommission. As a result of his inadvertent foray south, this marine was forced to carry out his mission alone. The survivor, nicknamed Bitterman, in the nightmare predicament of being isolated from friendly forces on an unimaginably hostile world, went on to lead his own one-man insurgency against the Strogg. His squad's primary target was the Big Gun, the Strogg's primary defense system. Accessing and destroying the Big Gun was a priority, because its destruction would guarantee relatively safe passage for the follow-up human invasion forces and all their ground war paraphernalia, and allow orbital and aerial bombardment to go on unhindered. The assassination of the Makron, an entity identified as the leader of the Strogg, was another central objective for Bitterman and the rest of the TCM ground forces. In a long and daring operation, against all the odds, this one marine succeeded in all of his objectives; removing a huge laser grid barring access to a vast Strogg industrial region, shutting down a horrifying Strogg-creation facility, disabling the power plant denying him access to the Big Gun, as well as severely hampering the Strogg's ability to wage an effective interplanetary war and keep its air force operational. Bitterman even achieved his final objective and assassinated the Makron abroad his secret asteroid redoubt in orbit above the world, narrowly avoiding death in an escape pod. With the Makron dead and the Big Gun destroyed, mankind had gained an invaluable window of opportunity, since the former disorganized the Strogg by leaving their command structure temporarily headless and reeling, and the latter took away Stroggos' main planetary defense system. Another marine (a Special Forces Commando) and his squad were dispatched to locate and destroy the Strogg counter-fleet, later learned to be stationed on the far side of Stroggos' unnamed moon. This marine's drop pod, like Bitterman, also had an accident during atmospheric entry; it was clipped by an asteroid just before entering the atmosphere, and crash landed in a swampy region dubbed the "Badlands" not far outside of the facility in which the rest of his squad was waiting. The survivor, nicknamed Joker, proceeded to carry out his mission and rejoin his team, only to find them just as they were being executed by heavily armed Strogg guards in the facility they were supposed to infiltrate. This terrible event left Joker to carry out his assigned mission on his own, as he did, making his way through several large facilities in the Badlands, en-route obtaining mission-critical intelligence which pointed him toward his primary objective. Making his way through the various facilities, Joker began encountering previously-unknown new Strogg designs in increasingly alarming numbers, along with some newly developed experimental Strogg weaponry. This harrowing, odds-defying one-man crusade eventually brought him to a Strogg spaceport, wherein he was able to board, capture and prevent the self-destruction of an enemy cargo spaceship ferrying supplies to a hidden moon base. Once aboard the moon base, Joker wiped out the Strogg forces standing in his way, including an important warlord (presumably the base commander), and sabotaged the base's geothermal reactor, causing it to melt down, destroying the base and counter-fleet. Joker escaped on a drop ship that landed in the hangar bay just before the destruction of the base, and probably thereafter piloted it back to the waiting Phobos or Deimos. After the launch of the human marines' main drop pod invasion force, the ships Phobos and Deimos attempted to pull away from the planet, but were unable to do so, thanks to an alarming increase in the planets gravitational pull, caused by a freshly activated Gravity Well Generator - a devious trap set by the Strogg to let them overwhelm and destroy the two human capital ships while (or after) the invasion force was crushed. The Phobos and Deimos became trapped in orbit as a result, and a large number of marines en-route to the planet's surface were subsequently ordered to destroy the source of their predicament. While the pods were still in-flight, and prior to the Big Gun's EMP detonation, Strogg Gorgon fighters rose up to engage the command ships, their fighters and their just-launched pods. The drop pods were given orbital covering fire from their command ships, one particular enemy fighter being shot down with a marine's pod close behind it. The downed Gorgon's impact into Stroggos' surface blew a sizable hole into the ground, causing the trailing pod, still following it (perhaps in some way affected by the Big Gun's EMP, as it was by now many miles off-course), to break through the surface of Stroggos and into the periphery of an underground mining complex, several miles north-north-west of Bitterman's pod's outer base landing site. This pod's occupant, nicknamed Stepchild, would proceed to fight his way through and out of the mines, disabling a large tectonic plate-stabilizing device along the way (which would have repercussions for Strogg facilities many miles away). On the surface he would manage to cripple the Strogg's ground-to-air communications (not far from the base Bitterman crashed into), and followed this victory up by traveling north-east towards an experimental fighter hangar, securing the fighter for transit off-world. His hard-fought ticket home secured, Stepchild's primary objective took priority, leading him to a munitions plant. There he created an Anti-Matter Bomb, which he was to use to destroy the Gravity Well. The Well was guarded by a creature dubbed the Black Widow Guardian, which was tenacious in battle, but ultimately defeated. The anti-matter bomb was planted, Stepchild returned to the hangar and flew the captured fighter back to the command ships. The resulting explosion destroyed the Gravity Well and devastated the surrounding area, possibly including the southern military base complexes which Stepchild and Bitterman both fought through. At this point, very few marines were retrievable; over 95% of the force sent down was killed or captured, making Stepchild and Joker two of the lucky handful of marines to survive. Bitterman's current state is as yet unknown; all the TCM knows is that he was alive and in one piece immediately after returning to the surface of Stroggos. With the Gravity Well gone, the Phobos and the Deimos were able to pull away from Stroggos, allowing the TCM's second invasion wave to commence its attack. The Second Invasion of Stroggos The TCM/SMC exploited the opportunity by launching a much larger second invasion of Stroggos in the belief it would finish off the Strogg once and for all. However, it was much more complicated than they expected. As usual the Strogg proved to be more resilient than the humans hoped, and they had not only reconstructed their Makron but their military forces were under a much more advanced system of tactical co-ordination than the humans, known as the Strogg Communication Network. The most elite handful of the SMC, led mainly by the toughest of the toughest, "Rhino Squad", was entrusted with a mission that the humans' commanders believed would neutralize the Strogg Communication Network thereby cutting off the Strogg soldiers from their commanders. It involved bringing down a form of technology known as the Nexus, which the humans so far had little information on but knew it was vital. Rhino Squad's target was one of the Strogg's central communication hubs called the Tetranode, which they believed an EMP bomb could neutralise and that this action would effectively bring down the Nexus and, by extension, the Strogg Communication Network. During the briefing the Nexus was described as the Strogg's "strength, but also their Achilles Heel". Though Rhino Squad succeeded in reaching the Tetranode, their luck ran out once they were inside the main structure. The EMP bomb was destroyed by the sudden appearance of a traveling Harvester. Then Matthew Kane, Rhino Squad's stealthy scout, the only squadmember who was uninjured in the incident, was given the responsibility of destroying the Tetranode itself with the assistance of Johann Strauss, a brilliant engineer with great knowledge about Strogg technology. By deactivating the cooling systems Kane succeeded in overheating the Tetranode and it destroyed itself. He then disappeared just as the Makron appeared and was later discovered stroggified in a Strogg medical facility. Since the neurocyte in his head had not been activated, because his own squad arrived in time to save him, he was able to remain under human control despite having the increased co-ordination and physical abilities that Strogg tactical units possess. He offered a new opportunity to the humans. They used him to breach Strogg barriers and use teleporters and ultimately penetrate past the Strogg security into the central Nexus Core tower. There he assassinated the second Makron in an eerie repetition of the events that ended the previous human onslaught against the Strogg, and then destroyed the Nexus itself, revealed to be a massive brain-like structure the Strogg had been using all along to brilliantly co-ordinate their military forces via the Strogg Communication Network. The end result is that the Strogg are now fighting at a severe disadvantage compared to the humans, since the latter did not have need for such a monumental control system as the Nexus to manage all of their strategies, but while the Strogg did the humans were being constantly outmaneuvered in terms of battle moves. Now, because each and every Strogg was incorporated into the programming of the now-destroyed Nexus and with the Makron dead once again, the now independent Strogg are severely crippled both tactically and strategically, as each individual Strogg is not known to have the same degree of tactical independence and initiative as a typical human soldier has. Because the Strogg are a particularly resilient enemy, the war is still ongoing. Though the destruction of the Nexus did not mark an immediate end to the war, and though it is likely that only the death of every last Strogg and the destruction or capture of every hostile facility on Stroggos could provide their genuinely conclusive and final defeat, the decisive Human victory over the Nexus means that the remainder of the war is little more than a large mop-up operation against displaced and disorganized threats. Category:Background Category:Spin-offs